Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Lawsuit Launched to Challenge Feds' Capture of Endangered Wolves That Enter Arizona or New Mexico

Lawsuit Launched to Challenge Feds' Capture of Endangered Wolves That Enter Arizona or New Mexico

SILVER CITY, N.M.— The Center for Biological Diversity today filed a formal notice
of intent to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the agency’s
decision to grant itself a “recovery permit” to live-capture endangered
wolves that may enter New Mexico and Arizona from Mexico or the Rocky
Mountains. Mexico recently released nine Mexican gray wolves
near the U.S. border in the Sierra Madre, and wolves from the northern
Rocky Mountains could make their way south at any time.

“It’s fantastic that Mexico’s working to restore wolves
to its northern wilds,” said Michael Robinson, the Center’s wolf
specialist. “And of course, these wolves in northern Mexico don’t
recognize political boundaries. If they’re able to set up a home range
that crosses the border, it would be tragic and wrong for Fish and
Wildlife officials to then capture them and snatch them out of that
home.”

Captured wolves will be placed into the captive-breeding
program, returned to where they came from, or relocated into the
Mexican wolf recovery area. Right now the only Mexican wolves in the two
states are in the “Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area,” an area between
Interstate 40 and Interstate 10 where wolves are considered an
experimental, non-essential population and therefore enjoy fewer
safeguards. But any wolves entering from Mexico or the north will be
fully endangered. The Center’s notice argues that Fish and Wildlife
failed to give the public an opportunity to comment, conduct an
environmental review, or show that capturing wolves would enhance the
recovery of wolves.
“Without any review or public notice, the Fish and
Wildlife Service has given itself autocratic authority to capture fully
endangered wolves,” said Robinson. “Taking wolves out of perfectly good
habitat makes no sense. We need to recover wolves to the Sierra Madre
and Sky Islands, as well as the mountains of northern New Mexico.”
Over the past month, the Center has filed two other
lawsuits against the Fish and Wildlife Service on behalf of the Mexican
wolf — one to compel reform of the stalled reintroduction program in
the United States and another to give protection to the Mexican wolf as a
subspecies, or distinct population, of the more widespread gray wolf,
deserving of its own, modern recovery plan.

The Mexican gray wolf is the smallest, most genetically
distinct subspecies of gray wolf in North America, and the most
imperiled. Trapping and poisoning by the Fish and Wildlife Service, in
both the United States and Mexico, prior to the 1973 passage of the
Endangered Species Act reduced Mexican wolves to just seven remaining
animals. These were caught alive and bred in captivity, enabling future
reintroduction efforts in the two countries.

The Center for Biological Diversity is
a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 450,000
members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered
species and wild places.

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone